SRI NARAYANA GURU AND INDIGENOUS MODERNITY by Dr. George Thadathil

SRI NARAYANA GURU AND INDIGENOUS MODERNITY 

Abstract
Impartial spectators perceive the need for a humane and practical secular platform for equality, justice, independence, etc. Any effort to identify the people who have changed the world, by their own direct effort, into a just order, would throw up individuals like Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, and Sree Narayana Guru. This essay (i) looks at the way SNG became a representative symbolic cult figure in the emergence of the community at a particular context; (ii) It identifies a ‘dialectic’ in the emergence of community consciousness; (iii) How the dialectic of opposition was resolved by the ideological framework of SNG and even in opposition to SNDP; and (iv) In this model of reconciling the dialectic, it is possible to identify the core of a new understanding of what ‘indigenous modernity’ means for contemporary India spilling over with ethnic and regional counter movements of diverse types.

George Thadathil, “Sri Narayana and Indigenous Modernity” in Tradition and Innovation: Philosophy of Rootedness and Openness, ed. Saju Chackalackal, 355-372, Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 2011.